"I don't even have to pretend to be an executive anymore," said Doom creator and current Rage lead John Carmack to Gamasutra. "I don't have to go to board meetings. I don't have to do anything! I can just sit in my office and work."
It has been just over two years since Bethesda bought out id Software, providing Carmack something of a reprieve from the doldrums of wearing a suit to work everyday. The man behind some of the biggest games ever now says he is once again ‘free’ to simply get back to work.
"I take resources and a goal, and I try and put them to the best use to get us there. That's what I do. I don't want to be doing anything else."
"One of the humbling things that you find is that, no matter how good of a programmer you are, you write code, and you make stupid mistakes," he notes. "And I am getting to be a huge proponent of really, really rigorous code analysis, because I have been going through pioneering these things, just squeegeeing through our code base, and every single programmer -- from our best to our worst -- they all make stupid mistakes, and they are unavoidable. So, we need to have more automated checks on these things."
Those checks come in the form of tools - tools that the team at id are certainly using to ensure that coding is done as efficiently as possible. Carmack speaks of the professional edition for Microsoft’s Visual Studio, a package that is incredibly expensive to use for PC developers. Interestingly enough, that professional studio is completely free to use for Xbox 360 developers.
"So, Microsoft has got some pretty good static analysis tools, and normally they make you buy, like an $8,000 professional edition of Visual Studio, but they give it for free to all Xbox developers -- which I think says an interesting thing about this stuff. Where Microsoft figures that, well, nobody blames them for crappy software on Windows, but they do blame Microsoft a bit for crappy software on 360, so it's in their best interest to put more static analysis tools available there.”
Carmack is adamant that devs should embrace such a tool.
"I swear, any 360 developer that's not using that is making a mistake. It will find problems in your code base. But after we got through all of that, we made it so it's warnings as errors, nobody can check in anything that doesn't pass that. We've been going on adding additional tools like PVS Studio and PC-Lint."
